Sunday, October 31, 2010

And the bus sure was skanky. I'd been fooled by the Greyhound Lucky Streak website, which shows sleek wi-fi buses that feature power outlets in each row. Before you laugh too hard at me, note that BoltBus manages these things. And Greyhound owns BoltBus.

But Greyhound can dress up their websites but they can't dress up their buses. All skank, all the way down the Garden State Parkway.

When we turned east onto the Atlantic City Expressway, I started to get excited. At what, exactly? I really have to get out more.

I'd chosen the departure that left at 5 p.m. for Caesar's. I'd scored a $50 room at The Chelsea, a new four-star boutique hotel near the Tropicana. Which was a hike, I knew. If I'd taken the Academy 5 p.m. bus, I could have gone straight to Tropicana, but I'd elected to go Greyhound on the logic that they had wi-fi (joke was on me), and I didn't know what the situation would be at my hotel. Many hotels charge a fortune for wi-fi, and then I'd just use my phone for internet.

(Note to self: find out how to tether my phone so I can use my laptop with it. I could do this in 2002 with my Motorola phone and Verizon. How hard can it be with modern tech?)

On arrival at Caesar's, everyone on the bus got a voucher good for $25 worth of slots. But first we would have to go to the Total Rewards desk and sign up for the loyalty program.

What the hell. I did it.

The man behind the desk was good-natured about my probing questions. Could I turn in the voucher for cash? No. Could I use it at more than one machine? No. The deal is: You use it once, on one machine, or maybe come back later and use the same machine. The original $25 you never get back as cash. You only get your winnings on the $25.

I'd come back later for the slots. I pocketed my new Total Rewards card and my voucher, and walked down Boardwalk to my hotel.

To my right were the dark, closed T-shirt shops and salt water taffy stores, dwarfed by neon-lit casinos. To the left was the giant sand dune, behind a railing. Just beyond is a beautiful beach and the Atlantic Ocean, but I couldn't see it from here.

I walked to Tropicana, then on to my hotel.

I stopped, blinked.

Oh.

The Chelsea is the old Holiday Inn. I've stayed there twice before, once with Turbo and once with Herr Marlboro. Given a choice, I'd have avoided it.

But I had prepaid on Priceline, and actually, it was a decent hotel even when it was a Holiday Inn. So I shelved any sentimentality, and headed through the revolving doors to Reception.

Oh, and wi-fi at The Chelsea? It's free.

The Quarter at Tropicana is intended to evoke Havana. To which I can only chuckle and suggest that the designers have never been to Havana.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Boarding the Greyhound for the 2.5 hour ride to Atlantic City, I score a seat to myself. A minute later, a tall, athlete-sized man leaves the seat he'd chosen next to another man, and "excuses" the hand bag I'd plopped down next to me when I'd heard the bus door close.

I am the smallest person left with a double seat.

He sits on the corner of my jacket, then opens his newspaper. His elbow pokes my forearm as he turns the pages.

Seven rows up, a tiny baby howls. Why the hell is a near-newborn on a casino bus?

A phone ring--loudly--across the aisle, and a man answers it.

"Hello? What? Stand still, I can't hear you. I can't hear you. What?"

We're in the Lincoln Tunnel. Not the wisest place for a phone call.

It occurs to me that I hate people sitting next to me. In fact, I hate the bus. I love trains, ships, my car. But I hate the fucking bus. This does not bode well for my future of travel. After all, I specialize in public transport.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Saturday, October 16, 2010

I'm overdoing it, as usual. This past week, I wrote three short articles on Atlantic City for the AOL SEED site, taught my class, got a freelance project to the printer, saw a gamelan opera, and did a half-dozen other little things, and today I have to go to a wedding.

On Wednesday nights, I have woodworking class at SVA. This is scary, because we use big power tools, but it's also utterly engaging, because it's so different than anything else that I do.

Unfortunately, woodworking class comes with homework. I took a few hours yesterday to do this week's homework, which was to make a mallet out of wood. We'll use these mallets to whack our chisels. My Friday night plan was to lathe at woodworking class, then head to the laundromat with my two weeks of dirty clothes and sawdust.

Here's my starting point. This isn't really a solid block. It's the piece we cut last week with the chop saw. We glued the two halves together and clamped them.

Progress! My block of wood is now round-ish.

This looks sort-of mallet-like. I really needed to work on it some more to smooth it out, but I was afraid I'd do more harm than good.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

On Sunday morning, I was trying to decide if I should go to an intermediate Photoshop workshop (no), or to finish my freelance assignment due Monday before writing my other freelance assignments due a day-and-a-half earlier, or to the comic book convention to talk to future possibilities (and maybe even boys, if I could find some single, age-appropriate ones).

Thursday, October 07, 2010

This sticker adorns the top of the planer in the wood shop in class where I am learning woodworking.

Yikes.

And here is the wood I started with last night. We all use the jointer to shave level one face, then used the fence on the jointer to shave level one side. Then we got to rip the other side on the table saw. Sometime today or tomorrow I have to go in and independently chop-saw the board in half, then wood glue and clamp it together.

I don't know when I'm going to do this. I have a job, teaching, this woodworking class, two freelance comic book jobs (one of which is in hardcore critical mass this weekend), three small freelance writing assignments due immediately, a two-day-long Photoshop workshop this weekend, and a comic con on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that now is a really good time to not ask me for anything. I should have my own warning sticker. Caution: Contents May Bite Your Head Off.

And last, here is the type of table I am learning to make by mid-December.

Sunday, October 03, 2010

Today is J.C.'s artist studio tour day, as well as being a beautiful sunny day with perfect slight autumn chill. A great afternoon for wandering the streets and peering into people's homes to see their paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs.

Unless, like me, you're bogged down with a half-dozen project all due immediately.

Still, certain things must be done. Like this:

At the pizza place, I interrupted the chatty old guy holding up the counter to ask for a slice. The proprietor slid a slice onto a spatula and tipped it into the brick oven, while I pulled out my phone to check my mail for the few minutes it takes to heat up a slice "to go."

"blah blah blah?"

Startled, I looked up. The old man was looking expectantly at me. He had said something to me.

"What?"

"You looking at the art today?"

He was just being polite. Nevertheless, there was only one way to answer that.

Saturday, October 02, 2010

My friend Stephanie is headed to Hanoi soon with her family. That reminded me of this stamp that I bought in the old quarter of Hanoi during MariesWorldTour, on a street devoted entirely to tampons, which means these stamps.

I was worried that my little running Marie character might be too complicated for the stamp-makers, but take a look at this blog, and you'll see photos of much more complicated images.

I went back to MariesWorldTour and looked for photos of this stamp, but there were none. I remember why...it was 2001. A different technological world. Now, I would just shoot it with my digital camera and upload it via my netbook or MacBook in my hotel room, using wireless internet. Or I'd photograph it with my phone and upload it via the mobile networks.

In 2001, there weren't many people doing online travel narratives, because it was hard. You couldn't just type into Blogger or WordPress. I coded entries in HTML as I went. Digital cameras were new and heavy, and batteries ran down fast. You couldn't get the files off your camera without installing drivers on computers, which no internet cafe would allow. There was no point in putting your files on your laptop as there was no such things a USB sticks and you couldn't hook your own computer up to the internet. No wireless.

I could have gotten the images off the laptop a few at a time using a floppy disk, but no internet cafe would let you put your own floppy into their system, for fear of viruses. In the end, I left my laptop and digital camera at home. I shot film, and scanned in images in the computer centers of the world, using various quality scanners and half-assed imaging software. And video? That was out of the question.

An ex-New Yorker starts blogging with "No Hurry in Africa" in Uganda and Namibia in 2005, moves to Kuwait and Cairo to make comic books, circumnavigates the world for a second time in 2011, then just when she settles down to see what NYC and JC hold for her, finds herself unexpectedly off to Burbank for work.